even though I love you and our bodies
are drenched together with starry atmosphere

and we fold the headlines together

crossfire and coffee grounds, apple core on page 6 and wildfire

held in the creases of douglas fir bark large enough to fold

our bodies into sideways making us thousand year old

passenger pigeons igniting the sky with fire and feather

and I wouldn’t check the time on my phone or see if you
texted me your undying commitment to love me back

through an evening so crumpled air sweeps away the history

of shell and perch and we live an eggless existence

our bodies bare and blue of sky and wolf
beaten in the gentle primrose cloud

that colors us the chiaroscuro blues of dusk

in the end of another beginning when the passenger pigeon

burned sunset into a migrating wilderness of survival

and loss on a star burning near sun

*

and loss burning on a star near sun

and the golden eye of the sky’s address

burning paper and bodies through the child’s looking glass

while a civilization is asleep

riding zip code air draft

until even god is endangered by the excessive grave yard

waiving its rights for spiritual petition

the ground opens for you until death is crowned

into extinction the loss of loss

forgive the ghosts their desire to come back

black rhinoceros tusk a cleft in time’s sheet drying on the line

a ray of sun among the billowing edges or

a stack of checkers ending all movement

*

a stack of checkers ending all movement, a crown

of silence, a crown of night

crown of fire
crown of tree
crown of motor
crown of ocean
crown of fist

crown of feathers an old wives tale, feathers weaving a halo

on the death pillow

when we used to die
at home

our spirits crossing the balcony’s threshold, ringing
the song of our passing

through the wind chime, a family relic your mom gave you

to bless the home, the song of death the song

of a thousand winds in a single willow, the song of

pigeons sewing haloes around our dreams

four wind chimes to ward away the spirits

ancient harmony smudged by earth’s thumb

on the wall of everything that ever lived

and came back until it couldn’t / imagine itself again

another way, death crowned an image

death crowned a species

*

death crowned a species

a humid red song, an orthodox

in the wind

chime

Martha died in Cincinnati
the city that sings

she had difficulty breathing, a distinct wheeze

a passerby noted, a disinterest

for entertaining the humans honoring gawking ing ing ing

the species

to be red
to be martha
to be passenger pigeon

you are red
you are martha
you are passenger pigeon

*

you are passenger pigeon

JM Miller is a poet and essayist living on a small organic farm on Vashon Island, Washington. They won the Grand Prize for the Eco Arts Awards in 2014 and were a finalist for Terrain.org’s 2013 poetry contest (read the poems). They have one chapbook, Primitive Elegy (alice blue books) and a forthcoming collection, Wilderness Lessons in 2016 (FutureCycle Press). JM directs poetry studies at the University of Washington in Tacoma and teaches at Richard Hugo House. Their work explores the environmental imagination, queer radicalism, the artist as activist and ways to use naturalism (the senses and spirit!) to access greater worldhood. View their website to learn more about them or download the Book of (Eco) Spells.

Header image of Billing pair by John James Audubon, the best known illustration of this species, but with scientific errors (1824).